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Gran said she should have framed her article differently. She shouldn’t have bluntly stated that the wedding was off but that it had merely been indefinitely postponed. Then they wouldn’t have had all this trouble with dresses and tuxedos and rings suddenly becoming unavailable. Odelia had argued that she’d framed it like this not to make people feel upset. Ifthey thought the wedding was off, they wouldn’t feel cheated out of a great party. Instead they’d feel sorry for the bride and groom, and Odelia and her family would still be able to show their faces around town without attracting criticism.

Gran had pointed out with irrefutable logic that sooner or later they’d find out that Chase and Odelia were married anyway, and they’d probably feel even more cheated.

“Dearest Chase,” she now announced with a smile. “When I met you…” She glanced down at the little piece of paper in her hand, and saw to her surprise that it wasn’t the little paper she’d printed out the day before at the office but the article she’d recently written about a hog wrestling match. The first line read ‘Bucky is a roly-poly big pink pig and never happier than when rolling in the mud at Norberry farm, his bucolic home.’

“Um…” she said, frantically trying to remember those vows she’d worked so hard to type up. Snippets surfaced in her memory but then submerged again into a thick brain fog as panic held her in its grip and cold sweat broke out across her back and neck.

Chase, whose eyes were flickering with mirth, prompted,“When you met me…”

“Um… when I met you, I was, um…” She crumpled up the adventures of Bucky the roly-poly pig, and felt a hot flush creep up her cheeks. “When we met, I was, um…”

“Happy, sad? Indifferent?” he said, a smile tugging at the corners of his mouth.

“Well, happy, of course.” Then she frowned. “Though in actual fact, no, I wasn’t happy,” she added, thinking back a little to the actual moment they met. “In fact I was very unhappy, since you told me to butt out of your investigation, which I thought was very rude of you, and inconsiderate. So I thought you were something of a jerk at first.”

“A jerk, huh?” said Chase, grinning now.

“Well, you have to admit that you were a jerk, Chase.”

“Okay.”

“And then there was that cat of yours. Brutus. He was… well, Brutus wasn’t very nice to my cats, especially Max—at least in the beginning. So of course I didn’t think—I mean I thought…” Oh, dear. This was turning into a complete and utter disaster, wasn’t it?

“In my defense, you were acting like a grade-A nosy parker,” said Chase, that smile still splitting his face in two. He seemed to think the whole thing was simply hilarious.

The officiant, meanwhile, or Elvis, as he said to call him, was eyeing the happy couple a little curiously. He probably got all sorts of people tying the knot in his presence, a good chunk of them so drunk they didn’t even remember later on that they’d actually gotten married. And here stood two stone-cold sober people, and the bride was determined to make the case why she shouldn’t get married, which was probably the opposite thing of what vows were intended to accomplish in the first place!

“If you want I can sing a song,” Elvis now suggested, to break the awful silence that had descended on the small crowd congregated for this joyous occasion.

“Just give him a kiss!” Gran shouted from the front row. “And tell him all is forgiven and forgotten!”

“Um…” she said. She wasn’t one of those people who are good at improvising, unfortunately. Nor was she the kind of person who is aces at public speaking, and without her notes she felt pretty much lost!

“I think it was obvious from the first,” said Max as he now came walking up to them and settled at Odelia’s feet, “that Chase was going to prove the most obnoxious, most annoying, most impossible person you’d ever met in your entire life. But very soon, and much to your surprise, you discovered that he was also the most wonderful, most kindhearted, most loving man you’d ever met. And it wasn’t long before you fell head over heels in love with the guy.” He smiled up at Odelia. “And so did we, as a matter of fact.”

Odelia gave her large blorange cat a grateful smile, and repeated, verbatim, the words he now spoke, acting as her impromptu prompter.

“I was worried you wouldn’t like my cats,” she said, “but it turns out you didn’t just tolerate them, but you took them into your heart faster than I thought possible. And much to my surprise we made not only the perfect professional team, but the best couple, too.”

Chase, who’d cut a quick glance to Max, and immediately figured out what was going on with all the meowing and the mewling, was positively beaming now.